This slender pamphlet contains two articles by the Mexican jurist Isidro Fabela, a reply by the then U. S. Ambassador to Mexico Robert C. Hill, and a final comment by Sr. Fabela. Insisting that he speaks as a friend of the United States, Sr. Fabela warns that American policy toward Cuba is being molded by business rather than national interests, that Mexico and the rest of Latin America are being alienated, and that “an aggressive policy toward Cuba gives arms to the Communists.” Ambassador Hill, who was then helping enforce the U. S.-sponsored oil blockade of Cuba, replies that Cuba was in no danger of attack, that Castro’s alliance with the U. S. S. R. was voluntary and planned in advance, that the sugar quota had to be cut because Cuba was no longer a reliable source of supply, and that the United States was entitled to retaliate against Cuban confiscation of American property.
Onrushing events have already proved that both parties to the dispute were at least partially mistaken. It is clear, as Sr. Fabela argues, that Cuba could have continued to supply the U. S. market with sugar, and that the barter deal for Soviet oil was understandable on an economic basis; and we now know that President Eisenhower had begun to equip and train a Cuban invasion force as early as April, 1960. Sr. Fabela, on the other hand, has placed too high a valuation on Castro’s early insistence that he was not a Communist, that “this revolution is not red, but olive-green.” Cuba’s leaders are now quite frank about their position in the “Communist camp.” This volume is useful, therefore, chiefly as an index of Latin American sentiment and as a reminder that Latin America “will no longer blindly follow the United States.”
